Quote of the Week---“Unlike much of what goes on in this town (DC)...this is Soul Nourishing”
Washington, DC—A former NSA intelligence officer, an independent filmmaker, a former U-S Senator and a guy who chucked his job as a well-paid flack for the insurance industry—almost by definition, you would have to cast this bunch as unlikely heroes.
On Wednesday, all four received an award named for Ron Ridenhour (a former New Orleans pal) the citizen soldier who changed the course of the nation’s history in the Viet Nam War by reporting to Congress the unhappy details he had personally ferreted out about the My Lai Massacre.
In describing the Ridenhour Awards, Andrew Bresleau the one time CNN producer and now president of The Nation Insitute got it right, when he uttered the Quote of the Week. The Ridenhour Awards are unique in terms of the events that draw large numbers of press in DC.
Breaslau likened it to a splash of cold water. He called the day “Soul Nourishing.”
Wendell Potter will never get an award for speech making, but he is a prime example of this soul nourishing sort. It was inspiring to hear him speak of how he found the courage to quit a “soul killing” six figure job doing PR for the insurance industry, because he could no longer stomach the way it routinely put profit-making ahead of providing access to healthcare—even in life and death situations.
Potter earned the Ridenhour Book Prize for “Deadly Spin” which Bill Moyers described as a probe "of corporate power that reveals why real health care reform didn’t happen, can’t happen, and won’t happen until that power is contained.” A copy of that book is next in my line on the must read list.
Thomas Drake could easily be confused for someone in the insurance biz (perhaps that is why the National Security Agency selected him in the first place) and hired him on the most unlikely day of September 11th, 2001.
Drake was no radical. His resume included stints in the Air Force, Navy and at a major DC consulting firm. But, like Potter, Drake saw stuff happening---this time, in the name of domestic security. He believed it flew in the face constitutional protection and he found he could not remain silent.
Drake still expresses amazement that you can be “charged with a crime for reporting a crime” in this country, but that fairly well describes his lot in life these days, working at an Apple store while awaiting trial this June on espionage charges…and facing a possible life sentence. Drake went up and down through all the proper channels expressing his concerns that Bush era eaves dropping programs were going beyond the limits of the law. After several years of inaction, Drake finally shared his concerns with the press.
Drake is also somewhat surprised that the Obama administration has made history in enforcing the Espionage Act more than any other administration. There have been only four Americans ever charged under the Act, but to be fair to Obama, the WikiLeaks scandal has kept the current administration more on the front lines of this controversy than they would like to be.
On Wednesday, Drake joined Daniel Ellsberg in the very small company of Americans who have both been charged under the Domestic Espionage Act, and also have reicieved a Ridenhour Award, in Drake’s case, the Prize for Truth Telling.
It is to see and hear these courageous folks that your humble reporter returns to DC each year and it’s a good thing he ran into some old pals from New Orleans this year, upon arrival.
I fully expected to take my usual place at one of the tables at the back, but was informed that, I had been invited to sit at table four up front, with the founders of the Ridenhour Awards and The Dark Side author Jane Mayer a former Ridenhour Award Winner
Happy circumstances indeed.
I can report that when you sit at a table like this, people like former Senator Russ Feingold walk up to you, offer their hand, and introduce themselves….to you. Then, a few moments later, he was on the podium receiving the Ridenhour Courage Prize.
Feingold was one of the few members of the Senate to cast a vote against W’s Invasion of Iraq, and he stood absolutely by himself in casing the only vote against the Orwellian named Patriot Act. If you think history has proved Feingold correct about those bits of history, perhaps you should hear what concerns him now.
Feingold is greatly worried about the Supreme Court’s “overturning a Century of settled law” and tilting the legal tables greatly in favor of the interests of big business. Feingold was tough on political leaders of both political stripes. He came down on Democrats and the White House for moving the trial of the September 11th attack suspects to GITMO, and he was critical of Republicans for their attack on collective bargaining rights in places like his home state of Wisconsin.
A new award was given this year, for documentary film making and it went a trio of producers behind Budrus which focuses on a Palestinian Community Organizer. It is on my must-see list, and a full report is promised.
A documentary film that never got produced may be one reason I got to sit at that front table. It is one that one that Randy Fertel, a co-founder of the Ridenhour Awards, and I worked together on and it focused on what wrong at My Lai.
Each year, at these awards, Randy finds a new way to inject a little bit of Ron into the proceedings. This year, Randy talked about Ron’s habit of immoderation. He accurately remembered Ridenhour as an “investigative journalist who turned in 10,000 word pieces for 1000 word deadlines — late of course.”
I can vouch for that, Ron free-lanced for me, when I was news director for WGSO Radio—and he was always trying to fit ten minutes worth of content into a buck thirty worth of radio time.
Randy’s point about Ron is that he was human and that he did not go out looking to be a hero. It was a job that fell to him because of information he came to know, and felt compelled to act upon. Like Thomas Drake working at the Apple store, Ron never got rich or even famous from doing the right thing…in fact when he worked for me, we could only afford to pay him with a company gas card, as a way to defray his costs while he worked for bigger projects for the world of print.
But, Randy’s point about Ridenhour is bigger still. It is about whistle-blowers in general and how they get treated like villains in our country.
Ron Ridenhour ended up on Nixon’s “enemies list” and Drake on trial for his life.
So yes, Ron was big, and brash and he often set off on long and seemingly impossible quests. Randy Fertel summed it up nicely, when he said, “If his is the picture of an immoderate man, we should all embrace his immoderation, his courage –– and his pure zeal for life and for truth.”
When I remember Ron, and I think of how these awards do nourish the soul each year. In particular, I think of something he said (when we were taping a My Lai discussion with Ron at Tulane University for the documentary). To quote Ron, "You find honest people in the most unlikely places."
I believe Ron was right, and that is why I was little surprised to find a documentary about Palestine winning an award on Wednesday…documentaries in the Middle East are the kinds of things we normally associate with taking big chances to blow the whistle on wrong doing.
My greater surprise, and the reason I return for the awards each year, is for those amazing heroes who keep showing up from the most unlikely places---like the NSA, the Insurance industry and certainly these days, the U.S. Senate.
